Before we begin, could everyone ensure that their phones are switched off? The selection list for today’s sitting is available in the room and online, and it shows how the amendments have been grouped together for debate. Amendments grouped together are generally are on the same or similar issues. I am aware that there are very experienced Members in the room, but there are also some who are not so experienced, so I will spend a moment running through the process.
A Member who has put their name to the lead amendment in a group is called first. Other Members are then free to catch my eye to speak on any or all of the amendments within that group. A Member may speak more than once in a single debate. At the end of a debate on a group of amendments, I shall call the Member who moved the lead amendment again. Before they sit down, they need to indicate whether they wish to withdraw the amendment or seek a decision. If any Member wishes to press any other amendment or new clause in a group to a vote, they need to let me know. I will work on the assumption that the Minister wishes the Committee to reach a decision on all Government amendments tabled.
Please note that decisions on amendments take place not in the order in which they are debated, but in the order in which they appear on the amendment paper. In other words, debate occurs according to the selection and grouping list, but decisions are taken when we come to the clause that the amendment affects. New clauses are decided after we have finished with the existing text—that is, after considering schedule 4 to the Bill. I shall use my discretion to decide whether to allow a separate stand part debate on individual clauses and schedules following the debates on the relevant amendments. I hope that explanation is helpful.

Kevin Brennan: The hon. Lady is quite right. Like her, I am much more shovelry than chivalry.
Amendment 2 stands in my name and that of my hon. Friend the Member for Tooting. As with all the Opposition’s amendments to the Bill, it is a probing amendment. Having closely looked at what was said on Second Reading, Members will realise that we merely seek to scrutinise and stress test the Bill a little. The Bill has completed its stages in the House of Lords, but some outstanding issues remain that we need to explore in Committee, particularly through the amendments that my hon. Friend and I have tabled. An amendment has also been tabled by a Government Back Bencher.
We made it clear on Second Reading that we very much support the Bill, which has been a long time coming. It brings into UK law the 1954 Hague convention, which the UK did not ratify at the time and which has been hanging around waiting for ratification for some considerable time, including after the second protocol was added in 1999. Indeed, it was the Labour Government in 2004 that announced their intention to legislate  in this way. They introduced a draft Bill in 2008,  which was then scrutinised by a Select Committee but unfortunately ran out of time prior to the 2010 general election and then went into a deep sleep under the coalition Government. It has been revived by this Government, which we think is a good thing, although it is now 62 years since the convention was originally passed.
We are not seeking to challenge the spirit of the convention or the principles of the Bill. In fact, we understand that it is in many ways a different kind of Bill. As the Minister reminded us yesterday in the Programming Sub-Committee, the schedules are in effect there to give the Committee information, rather than to be debated or amended. They actually represent the wording of the convention and the subsequent protocols to it. The first six parts of the Bill are very much for us to debate and amend. As I have said, our amendments will, for the most part, be probing amendments, as this one is. I agree with what the Secretary of State said on Second Reading:
“We want to get on with it”.—[Official Report, 31 October 2016; Vol. 616, c. 700.]
That is why we are here today. I hope that we will be able to conclude our proceedings in the plenty of time given by the programme motion that was agreed by the Government and the Opposition.
We would like the Government to clarify some aspects of the Bill that could create difficulties in future for those who have to interpret and implement it when it becomes law. Amendment 2, which we are considering in conjunction with amendment 6, speaks to one such difficulty. An inevitable consequence of the Bill’s 62-year gestation is that certain aspects of it may well have become outdated. The convention was written in the light of the cultural destruction of the second world war, but quite a lot has happened in the intervening period. The descriptions of the types of cultural property that are in need of protection, which can be found in schedule 1 to the Bill, show their age in the way they refer to physical artefacts and the buildings that house them, with no mention of, for example, those objects that take a digital, rather than physical, form.
The convention, as it is worded, covers cultural property that is “movable or immovable”, but the question that was quite reasonably raised in the other place is whether it covers digital cultural artefacts. For example, would it cover moving images as well as movable or immovable images? I understand that the list in schedule 1 is illustrative and not necessarily exclusive, and that the omission might be seen in some ways as a natural consequence of technological developments rather than any particular negligence at the time, but I still think that it would be useful for the Minister to set out the Government’s position on that.
Having said that it is because of technological developments, it may also reflect a change in mind set since 1954 with regard to what are regarded as cultural objects. It is quite telling that the wording of schedule 1 and the definition of cultural property under article 1 of the convention do not seem to say or to imply that, for example, film would be included as cultural property in that regard. Perhaps people in 1954 did not envisage that film, which was still a relatively new form of artistic expression, albeit more than half a century old, would fall into the category of a cultural object. Lord Stevenson spoke quite eloquently in the other place about the growing and indisputable importance of film, and subsequently television, and the way that they are woven into everyday life, and the way that they reflect, reproduce and challenge the worlds that we inhabit. Therefore, the national film archives in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, as well as regional archives, are all of critical importance.
In fact, a couple of years ago I was fortunate enough to visit the British Film Institute’s archives, which are located near Milton Keynes—if the Minister gets an opportunity in her busy life, I recommend she visits them at some stage—to see the work being done to preserve the cultural heritage of the British film industry. In recent years we had the fantastic discovery of the very early Mitchell and Kenyon films, which catalogue life in the Edwardian era in an incredibly moving and powerful way. They reveal the cultural life of ordinary people in this country, not just so-called high culture, showing how they lived and spent their leisure time and their working lives more than 100 years ago with an amazingly vivid quality. While I was there, I was given  a DVD of some of the early colour films of Claude  Friese-Greene, who developed an early technique for making colour films but was largely forgotten for many years. There are amazingly vivid images of life in the UK from a tour he took in the 1920s.
To confirm that “cultural property” can be interpreted to include that which takes a digital form would clarify that items do not need to be ancient to be covered by the Bill and by the convention. Our creative industries are thriving, dynamic and constantly changing, producing precious commodities that deserve our protection. I therefore hope that the Minister will assure us that they will be granted the protection outlined in the Bill in the event of armed conflict.
The Minister may argue that the Bill, once passed, will take its place among other UK laws on the protection of cultural property and that we would be better off ensuring that digital culture is covered by those Acts, rather than risk amending the Bill. I understand that argument, which is why I outlined that this is a probing amendment to ensure that we have the Government’s position on the record. However, to ensure that we have informed the future interpretation of the Bill, we want to ensure that UK law is as consistent as possible and that there can be no doubt about the importance of digital cultural property or the severity or importance of anything done to destroy it. I hope that the concerns raised are remembered when we decide which items of cultural property are to be safeguarded by the cultural protection fund.
When this topic was debated in the House of Lords, the Minister, Baroness Neville-Rolfe, said that the wording of schedule 1—in other words, the 1954 convention—was
“flexible enough to meet the concerns expressed about what sort of cultural property might be covered.”
However, earlier in the same speech she responded to Labour’s amendment on the topic by saying
“the noble Lord’s amendment risks allowing the development of an interpretation of the definition in the United Kingdom which is not consistent with its internationally accepted interpretation. That would be undesirable. It would create uncertainty and inconsistency in the application of the convention and its protocols and could result in the UK failing to comply with its obligations under them.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 28 June 2016; Vol. 773, c. 1478-1479.]
In those two statements there is some possibility of misunderstanding. Is interpreting cultural property so as to include that which takes a digital form a fair interpretation of flexible wording, as the Minister seemed to hint at one point in her remarks? Alternatively, is that interpretation—as expressed in a probing amendment in the House of Lords—a threat to the ratification of the convention? She seems to be suggesting that, and both those things cannot be true. We would be most grateful if the Minister clarified the Government’s exact position on that point. The more strongly she expresses the Government’s view that digital property is covered under the wording of the convention, and therefore by the Bill, the better.
Amendment 6 probes how part 3 of the Bill, which relates to the cultural emblem, fits into the digital age. Hon. Members will have noted that the Bill is unusual in another way, besides the fact that we are not debating the schedules, because it contains a picture. That is unusual in a parliamentary Bill.

Victoria Borwick: It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Buck. I would like to declare that I am the president of the British Antique Dealers’ Association, and I have been advised by the British Art Market Federation, the Antiquities Dealers’ Association and LAPADA, all of which have made written representations to this Committee.
I wish to draw the Committee’s attention to the art and antique market’s concerns about the definition of cultural property in the clause, which draws on the convention. I am grateful to the Minister for her clarification. A number of representative bodies of the art and antiques market, which is the second largest market in the world, have made written submissions to the Committee. I draw Members’ attention to the submissions from the British Art Market Federation, the Antiquities Dealers’ Association, Professor Janet Ulph and LAPADA, among others. They all make clear that they are fully supportive of the Bill.
It is particularly important that honest and well-intentioned dealers and auction houses do not risk criminal prosecution when conducting reasonable due diligence. As the Committee will have read in those submissions, the three aspects of the Bill that concern the trade relate to avoiding uncertainty in the art market and ensuring clarity in the practical operation of the law. There is no doubt that uncertainty hampers the successful operation of any market, and it is reassuring that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State made clear on the Floor of the House that she does not want the market to be hampered.
The clause 17 offence that we will come to later of dealing in unlawfully exported property depends directly on clarity and understanding of what is meant in the Bill by the term “cultural property”. As it stands, the punctuation used in sub-paragraph (a) of article 1 of the convention, which is reproduced in schedule 1 to the Bill, means that cultural property is not limited to property of great importance to the cultural heritage of every people, although the Minister has just clarified that cultural property can be protected if it is of great importance to every people. The market seeks absolute clarification of those points. Other categories of property are covered in the definition, regardless of their  cultural significance, including works of art, manuscripts,  books and other objects of artistic, historical or archaeological interest.
It has been drawn to my attention that the original—and, as article 29 states, equally authoritative—French and Spanish texts of the convention, which I have to hand, are not worded in that way. They use commas, not semi-colons. On account of that, in the French and Spanish versions a work of art must be of great importance to the cultural heritage of every people for the convention to apply to it. I was delighted that the Minister confirmed in the House on 31 October that the Government intend to take the same restricted approach to the definition of cultural property and that the clause 17 offence of dealing in unlawfully exported property will apply only to a very small but very special category of cultural objects—those which are of great importance to the cultural heritage of every people. I thank the Minister for her clarification on that point this morning.
Given what we know about the other versions of the convention and the Government’s intention that the Bill should apply only to objects that are of great importance to the cultural heritage of every people, it cannot surely be right for the wording of the law to be at odds with its intention. I have not tabled an amendment on this important point, but the Government might consider a little clarification on it.